I didn't quit my job to find myself.
That's what people say afterwards, once it worked out. Once there's a story to tell and a brand to build around it. The truth is I quit because I couldn't remember who I was before the job took over. And that's not poetic — it's just what happened.
I was 35. Twelve years in HR. I had managed teams, run processes, hired people, fired people, sat in enough meetings to fill a lifetime. I was good at it. That was the problem.
The day I handed in my resignation, my manager asked me what I was going to do next. I said: travel. He looked at me the way people look at someone who just said something stupid in public.
The First Country Always Lies
Turkey was supposed to be a warm-up. Two weeks, get the travel itch out of your system, come back and figure out the next career move.
I stayed a month.
Not because Turkey is magical — though parts of it are. But because something happened in Konya, in a small hall where men in white skirts were spinning in circles. I stood there watching them for an hour and felt, for the first time in years, completely quiet.
I didn't know what to do with that feeling. So I kept moving.
What Nobody Tells You About Quitting
The first three months, you feel guilty.
Not about leaving — about enjoying it. There's a specific shame that comes with sitting in a Jordanian desert at sunset, watching two camels stand completely still against a red sky, while your former colleagues are in a Monday morning meeting. You feel like you're stealing something.
Then the guilt fades. And what comes after is stranger: you realize how much of your personality was just the job.
Without it, you don't know how to introduce yourself. You don't know what time to wake up. You don't know what to want for dinner because no one has scheduled it.
Freedom is deeply uncomfortable at first. Not liberating. Uncomfortable. Like a room with no furniture.
Two years of solo travel taught me one thing nobody talks about: freedom is deeply uncomfortable at first. Not liberating. Uncomfortable. Like a room with no furniture.
The Places That Changed Something
India broke me open in a way I wasn't ready for. Not spiritually — just overwhelmingly. The noise, the colour, the weight of it. I arrived thinking I would observe. India doesn't let you observe. It pulls you in by the collar.
Nepal wasn't on the plan. My Indian visa expired, I crossed the border at 4am, and found myself standing at the foot of a temple in Kathmandu watching a man pray in front of hundreds of candles. I stood there a long time. Long enough to understand that some of the most important moments of your life happen because you ran out of options.
In Ladakh, at a monastery called Lamayuru, I taught English to young monks for a month. I had gone there thinking I had something to give. I left understanding they had been teaching me the whole time.
The Mentawai Islands were the end of something. A remote archipelago off the coast of Sumatra, no wifi, no plan, just a community of people who have lived the same way for thousands of years. Sitting with a Sikerei — a shaman — who had never left his island, I felt less like a traveler and more like someone who had been walking in the wrong direction for a long time and had finally turned around.
What the World Does Inside You
I came back — if you can call it that — two years later. Not to my old life, not to HR, not to the version of myself that had needed to leave.
I came back with two years of photographs, hundreds of pages of notes, and a question that had slowly become the foundation of everything I've built since:
What if travel isn't about the places you go — but about what those places do inside you?
That question became ROÛH.
Not a travel company in the traditional sense. Something closer to what I had been searching for without knowing it: journeys that take you somewhere real — not just geographically.
The Part I Didn't Expect
I thought quitting would be the hard part.
It wasn't. The hard part was coming back and deciding not to pretend the journey hadn't changed me.
A lot of people return from long trips and quietly re-enter the life they left. The mortgage, the career ladder, the meetings on Monday morning. I understand why. It's easier. The world is very good at absorbing you back.
I chose not to. Not out of bravery — out of stubbornness, mostly. I had seen too much to fit back into something that no longer made sense.
If you're reading this wondering whether to go — I can't tell you what will happen. I can tell you that two years of not knowing what comes next was the most honest I've ever been with myself.
And that everything I've built since has come from that honesty.
My manager still works there. He got promoted twice.
I don't think either of us made the wrong choice.
We just weren't asking the same question.
At ROÛH, we design journeys for people who are ready to be changed by where they go. Not tourists. Travelers who carry the question with them.